Mrs. Beauty and her Pride
Beauty’s wood house sat isolated and high on the side of the magic mountain like an egg waiting to fall. As a boy, I often dreamt that the four rickety pillars that held up the frame would one day snap, hurling the house and its contents — a sink full of dirty pots, pans, plates, spoons, knives, forks, soggy mattresses, a wooden table and chairs, a used chamber pot, a capricious refrigerator and sulking stove, a small malcontent black and white tv with a missing volume knob, a solemn leather-bound bible and a flock of composition notebooks that flapped like frightened pigeons—down to the valley below.
Like her house, Beauty and her children were also cut off from the rest of the village. Her isolation, however, was all her fault, as Beauty believed–a belief which was quietly shared by many of our villages– that her fair skin and long, wavy hair meant she was above the black people of our village. As nature would have it, Beauty had one flaw—she despised her broad African nose, a feature she inherited from her black mother.
Part 2
Whenever Beauty was angry the whole village paid for it.
A terrifying cacophony of maternal screams fractured the peace and tranquility of our village at random hours of the day and night. From her position at the top of the hill, the disturbance felt like the Biblical scene between The Most High God and the fallen angel Lucifer.
She could cuss bad words with the best, which rained down like fire and brimstone on the village below.
“Mother cunt, cacahole, kissmeass,” were her refrain.
At the climax of her rage, Beauty would sometimes fling her white cast iron chamber pot filled with her family’s excrement from the night before down the mountainside. While most of the pot’s content was ejected on the flight down, the pot itself picked up terrifying speed that had at times caused damage to galvanized roofs of the houses below.
One night while sleeping, our poor house was awoken by a thunderous sound on the roof.
“Boodoombambam.”
At first, we assumed that a big stone had dislodged from the mountainside unto the roof and so thought nothing of it. The following day my father awoke early to investigate, where he found Beauty’s chamber pot floating in one of the water barrels in the backyard used for cooking and bathing. To make matters worse, the chamber pot had left a hole in our roof that eventually caused a leak in the boys’ bedroom.
After surveying the damage, my father mumbled a few words under his breath. Then in the spirit of Christian forgiveness, he decided to walk up the mountain, cutlass in hand, to the edge of Beauty’s yard.
“Mrs. Beauty, Mrs. Beauty, Mrs. Beauty,” my father called, with his voice rising each time.
As my father and I stood nervously waiting, Beauty’s mingy put hounds raised such a loud alarm until Beauty was obliged to appear at her bedroom window.
In my guts, I knew that this encounter would not end well. The history of the two families was a perpetual war of cuss words and bad eyes that went back donkey years, all because of our greedy goats that had a habit of razing Beauty’s precious vegetable garden.
And so my father had merely mentioned the chamber pot in the water drum before Beauty fired upon him from her wooden perch.
“Why you by meh land Francis, you don’t afraid,” cried Beauty.
“ Woman, I don’t come to fight. I want to tell yah about the damage on my roof,” said my father.
“ Don’t make a joke, your kismeass goats do raid meh garden, and yah never give meh a blasted red cent,” shouted Beauty.
“Don’t make a joke with meh woman, I is a man of God,” declared my father.
“Man of God meh backside,” cried Beauty.
“Woman I warning you,” said my father calmly before leaving.
Beauty wasn’t finished, however, needing as she did, the final word.
“Man of God.” “What man of God does carry a cutlass to talk,” cried Beauty.
“I rebuke you, in the name of the Lord,” whispered my father, as I walked behind him down the hill towards home.
Part 3
One morning I overheard my mother and the next-door neighbor Mrs. Petal discussing the village news by the makeshift fence when the topic of Beauty came up.
“Morning Joyce,” said Mrs. Petal, still in her white full slip pulled up to her mammoth cow breast.
“Morning, morning,” replied my mother dryly.
“Hear nah, what went on last night? I hear a set ah noise like a bomb go off and on top of all yah house. All you ok?” asked Mrs. Petal.
“Things good. Thank God,” replied my mother
“ Well here nah, I hear Beauty throw a big stone on the house self.”
“Something so,” said my mother cautiously.
‘That woman mad,” said Mrs. Petal “and is the man does she so.”
According to Mrs. Petal, Little Big John, Beauty’s husband had another woman in town, which was bad enough. But on the other hand, Beauty’s rival was a short black woman with large thighs_- the opposite of Beauty the woman could not compare to Beauty in looks and shape.
“That was the knife in her chest,” said Mrs. Petal.
“ Poor thing,” said my mother.
“The men and the eye too long,” said Mrs. Petal.
Part 4
I was forever curious as a cat to know what went on in Beauty’s house. For one, some in the village believed Beauty practiced obeah and was secretly a La-Diablesse, which I wanted to confirm. But other than that the idea came to me after reading over and over, the enthralling fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk. I saw myself as the character Jack, who climbed up the beanstalk and entered the world of the unfriendly giant that lived in the sky. Only in my case, Beauty was the mean giant and the steep, rocky hill that led to her house was the beanstalk.
One Saturday morning, during the two months off from school, the opportunity came. The house was barren after Beauty was readmitted to Saint Ann’s mental health hospital for cussing two government workers attempting to check up on the general conditions in the house as well as her five children. From my gallery, I watched with sympathy the man and woman in their tight slacks, white shirts, and hard bottom shoes struggle up the hillway to Beauty’s house, all the while threatened by the village hounds that snapped at their heels. Once there, Beauty’s mutts somehow got loose and attempted to bite one of the government workers, sending both of them running for their lives. Early the next morning reinforcement was called and Beauty and her children were removed from the house.
I woke up early that morning, drank a cup of Lipton tea, and before my mother could miss me, snuck up the hill past the chicken coop and latrine to Beauty’s house. An invisible line seems to separate the border between Beauty’s compound and the rest of the world. Crossing the threshold, I felt like the first man who walked on the moon. Without fail, the mingy mutts tied under the house began a nasty racket that I quickly silenced with a few big stones, one of which struck the matriarchy in her sagging tis.
“Rooooooawoooooo,” cried the mutt before returning to the dept of her makeshift lair.
I slowly approached the house from the side where I noticed the space between the planks of the board was wide enough to see inside. My heart raced as I prepared to look. A lifetime of hardened myths was about to be dissolved.
Here is what I saw:
A large room that looked much like a barn– with no walls separating the kitchen, living, and sleeping area. In the center sat a high wooden nest of a bed with piles of unfolded rags, children’s uniforms, and underwear that reached as high as the door frame. The wooden floor was littered with the body parts of pink dolls—a toros and an arm there and some were even headless. Also, miniature green army men carrying rifles that the boy loved to play with lay scattered on an abandoned battlefield. In another corner, a small television with a large black bible on top and two candles served as an altar where a large picture of white Jesus was hung and below that a picture of Beauty in a pageant gown. To the front of the house, two small curtained windows were spaced equally apart like watchful eyes spying on the village below. Awoken from the spell cast by Beauty’s room, I took a few cautious steps to the back of the house but was unprepared for what I saw next.
Our long lost goat that was tied to the post of Beauty’s door kitchen. The goat had gained weight, almost double in size. And the thought entered my mind that he was being prepared for the upcoming Christmas table. Attempting to release him, I found a long knife impaled into the wall next to the kitchen sink. The sink itself was clean except for the day-old fish head that had been left behind during Beauty’s abrupt departure and which now attracted a confederation of flies at a free banquet.
Eventually, I freed the ungrateful goat with the edge of the knife, who stood chewing its cud at the sight of his pending sacrifice. Frustrated by his lack of movement, I finally kicked him in the rear, which sent him scampering down the hill.
As I made my descent, the dogs commenced barking but this time in a much-humbled tone. Then silence. From this height, I picked out the galvanized roofs of houses of several of the fellas. Further in the distance I saw the Pentecostal church and even further, the back school and the main avenue that passed through the various villages. Like Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk, the nightmare was over.
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